Elizabeth Bauerle is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s medical center. To get from her home in the north Seattle suburb of Shoreline to her job on the Seattle campus, she can either drive or take two buses.

A recent statement from the AFL-CIO regarding a rejection of NAFTA and other corporate/globalist trade agreements unfortunately only skims the surface of the issues working people face.

As the dominate union leadership in America, the AFL-CIO and its member unions need to take a deeper look at their historical behavior, and their role in enabling the evolution of the corporate state with its current right wing/anti labor swing.

American unions never were interested in taking responsibility for production. American unions developed to confront management but not to replace it. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was the only organization that tried to organize horizontally across all sectors to create a “new world in the shell of the old”. The vision of workers building a society where prosperity was available to all and artificial class barriers would dissolve was never a popular theme in American labor. We have always felt that we needed the owners, agreeing at least subliminally that capital has more power than basic human needs; that human weakness, pettiness, and laziness would wreck any sort of money-free effort to exchange services; that hierarchies of wages and benefits were natural and that those at the bottom were there due to their own fault.

The evolution of trade unions cemented in place these hierarchies, leaving the least skilled workers unorganized until the CIO attempted to fill the need while organizing mine workers and African Americans during the Great depression. The following era of war-induced prosperity, and the ongoing economic expansion during the Cold War, created a phony, unsustainable sense of American prosperity for a growing middle class, where 5% of the world’s population consumed 80% of its resources. The AFL-CIO was active in this period wrecking third world union organizing attempts as a front for a CIA run, right-wing sponsored, American style Imperialism. On the home front, a rising middle class of workers were happy to build low quality products, for good wages, as the disposable society offered an endless supply of the “latest” consumer goods. Conspicuous consumption and keeping up with the Jones’s did not include the working poor or the third world.

Although he died in 2006, Murray Bookchin is recently in the news. Staid bourgeois newspapers report, with apparent shock, that part of the Kurdish revolutionary national movement has been influenced by the ideas of Murray Bookchin, a U.S. anarchist (Enzinna 2015). However, I am not going to discuss this development here. My topic is not how Bookchin’s political philosophy may apply to the Kurds in Rojava (important as this is), but how it might apply to the U.S.A. and other industrialized and industrializing countries.

Nor will I review the whole range of Bookchin’s life and work (see White 2008). Bookchin made enormous contributions to anarchism, especially—but not only—his integration of ecology with anarchism. At the same time, in my opinion, his work was deeply flawed in that he rejected the working class as playing a major role in the transition from capitalism to anti-authoritarian socialism. Like many other radicals in the period after World War II, he was shaken by the defeats of the world working class during the ‘thirties and ‘forties, and impressed by the prosperity and stability of the Western world after the Second World War. Previously a Communist and then a Trotskyist, he now turned to a version of anarchism which rejected working class revolution.

This was not the historically dominant view held by anarchists. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Makhno, Goldman, Durrutti, the anarcho-syndicalists and the anarcho-communists—they believed that “anarchism is a revolutionary, internationalist, class struggle form of libertarian socialism…. Syndicalism [revolutionary unionism—WP] was a form of mass anarchism…and the great majority of anarchists embraced it.” (Schmidt & van der Walt 2009; 170) For them, the “broad anarchist tradition” was “‘class struggle’ anarchism, sometimes called revolutionary communist anarchism….” (19)

However, in his 1969 pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!” (republished in Bookchin 1986; 195—242), Bookchin denounced “the myth of the proletariat.” He wrote, "We have seen the working class neutralized as the ‘agent of revolutionary change,’ albeit still struggling within a bourgeois framework for more wages [and] shorter hours….The class struggle…has [been]…co-opted into capitalism…. " (202) The last collection of his writings repeats his belief, “…The Second World War…brought to an end to the entire era of revolutionary proletarian socialism…that had emerged in June 1848” (Bookchin 2015; 127). By an “era of revolutionary proletarian socialism,” he did not mean there had been successful workers’ revolutions, but that there had been mass working class movements (Socialist, Communist, and anarchist), with a number of attempted revolutions.

He wrote, “…The worker [is] dominated by the factory hierarchy, by the industrial routine, and by the work ethic….Capitalist production not only renews the social relations of capitalism with each working day…it also renews the psyche, values, and ideology of capitalism” (Bookchin 1986; 203 & 206). (Why these deadening effects of industrial capitalist production did not prevent the existence of a movement for “revolutionary proletarian socialism” for an “entire era” from 1848 to World War II, he did not explain.)

Bookchin did not deny that there still were workers’ struggles for better wages and shorter hours, but he no longer saw this low level class conflict as indicating a potential for a workers’ revolution. Nor did he deny that workers might become revolutionary, but only, he said, if they stopped thinking of themselves as workers, focused on issues unrelated to their daily work, and regarded themselves as declassed “citizens.”

The US labor movement is in terrible shape; in 2016, union membership was only 6.4 percent of workers in the private sector, and 34.4 percent of the public sector, giving an overall percentage of 10.7 percent.[1] (It had been 33.4 percent in 1954.) But, worse than the actual numbers and percentages is the all-but-total lack of vision as to what to do about this. The labor movement has been under direct attack since at least the PATCO strike in 1981, and the leaders of the labor movement—and focus here is on the AFL-CIO, although there are others labor organizations outside of its ambit—have had no vision and, arguably, no clue about what to do about this. And other than perhaps a nine-year window under John Sweeney (1996-2005)—I’m being generous—it has been blind and vision-less. And this continues today under Richard Trumka.[2]

This problem is a major reason for the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, aided strongly by working class voters, and I’m speaking of those who are not generally racist, sexist, homophobic and/or xenophobic.

The fact is that, no matter how good any one of our national/international union leaders might be as an individual trade union leader, that does not necessarily make them a good labor leader. By “labor leader,” I’m referring to those who look out for the well-being of working people in general in this country; i.e., those who go beyond members of their own union to think about working people overall. I would give the AFL-CIO leaders, individually and collectively, an “F” for their efforts since the early 1980s—with Sweeney possibly getting a D for the nine years referred to above.

This failure is even worse in light of myriad efforts by rank-and-file activists, lower level leaders and staffers, and labor researchers/academics who have spent years of their lives struggling to get the labor movement to address its’ weaknesses and change its ways. Whether through organizing new members, educating and mobilizing current members, analyzing what we can learn from workers’ struggles in the past as well as from studying contemporary efforts at home and overseas, and thinking about how we can revitalize the labor movement so as to seriously address the problems facing working people in this country, there has been extensive efforts by those “below” to overcome the lack of vision and ineptitude of national labor leaders; but the institutional power granted these “leaders” has overcome all efforts to date to initiate progressive, life-enhancing change.[3]

I’m going to argue that this organizational failure is more than individual failures, which could perhaps be overcome by the election of new leaders, although obviously individual leaders can have a significant impact once put into office. However, I’m going to argue that the primary problem is in our very model of trade unionism in this country: I argue that the model of trade unionism that has dominated US unionism—business unionism—offers no viable way forward and must be replaced by another model, that of social justice unionism. I’m going to argue that unless this change from business unionism to social justice unionism is made, and made soon, the US labor movement is going to fade into irrelevancy, with its power and importance diminishing even further as years go by.

Several steps must be made to develop this argument. First, the theoretical delineations of business and trade unionism are presented, which are crucial to understand the argument being made. Then, a historical overview is presented, with a primary focus on the CIO years, 1933-1955, and special attention is paid to the removal of “the left” from the CIO in the late 1940s. This is followed by a discussion of “global competition, the US economy and the attacks on working people,” and then a question: “where is the AFL-CIO leadership?”

Following, there is an effort to make sense of why the AFL-CIO leadership has been “missing in action.” Key to understanding this, it is argued, is to connect the lack of AFL-CIO initiative in domestic situations to the initiative it shows in international affairs—and that requires discussion of the US Empire, and the AFL-CIO leadership’s support of it. And why they support the US Empire.

And then, there is the beginning of a discussion of how progressive workers can reclaim our labor movement.

The miners from Obrochishte - the third largest manganese mine in the world, located in eastern Bulgaria, went on wildcat strike on 01.06.2017. The strike was supported by the anarchosyndicalists from ARS (Avtonomen Rabotnicheski Sindikat / Autonomous Workers Union), while the bureaucratic union in the mine opposed the strike and sided with the bosses.

17 miners from the day shift refused to come out of the mine and stayed underground for 5 days. All the workers from the other shifts, around 150 people, joined the strike. The miners, alongside with the anarchosyndicalists, blocked the main portal so the trucks of the company could not get the goods out. The strike broke out after the management refused to comply with the collective bargaining agreement that was signed earlier this year. The collective agreement was the result of similar strikes in March, when the miners went on hunger strike and organized mass protests to demand raise in salaries, improvement of the working conditions and review of the mining concession contract. Wages in the mine are extremely low - between 230 EUR ( the minimum wage in Bulgaria) and 305 EUR per month. Workers do not receive the necessary equipment, no food vouchers, they don't have transportation provided and the working conditions in the mine are terrifying.

The current 25-years concession contract for the mine was made back in 1999 by the right wing government of Ivan Kostov, famous for his mass privatization policy. For the last 18 years, the private operator of the mine - "EuroMangan", failed to comply with any of the concession agreements, which led to ecological and social disaster in the region. During all those years not a single inspection or regulation was made by the authorities. The organization is owed by a Cyprus offshore company with unclear ownership, but the day-to-day operations are managed by a women named Teresa Dankova, famous among the workers as 'the satan'. She regularly insults the miners, refuses to sign their papers for their social benefits and once she even refused to open the gates for an ambulance to pick up a heavily injured worker. During the March strike, the CEO of "EuroMangan" David Wellinges called the miners' demands - "an extortion". Nevertheless, following pressure from the workers, and through the mediation of the Minister of Energy and the Ombudsman, a collective labor agreement was signed, which stipulated an increase in salaries (albeit with the pitiful 75 EUR), transportation for the workers and also the employer made a commitment to abide by the labor laws.

But it turned out the collective agreement means nothing to the company. They have so far failed to fullfil any of the agreed terms. Furthermore the management has yet to pay salaries for April. That's why the miners went on strike again, but this time with more radical demands - they want all the bosses to leave the mine for good. The strikers got a lot of media attention and solidarity. Autonomous Workers Union organized actions of solidarity with the miners in the capital city of Sofia. Workers from the Varna's section of the union (the closest big town to the mine) joined the strikers in their blockade and raised money for food supplies.

The strike ended on 05.06.2017 when the government officials stepped in, "freezed" the concession and gave 14-days term to terminate it permanently. With this semi-victory, the miners went out from the underground after 5 days, but said that the blockade of the mine stays, as well as strike-readiness, and that if the bosses return after the 14-days term, they will resume the direct actions. In that period, Autonomous Workers Union plans to organize more solidarity actions as well as protests in front of the ministry of electricity (the ministry that is in charge of the concession), so it can put pressure on the officials to comply with the workers' demands.

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